ABSTRACT
Coherent with contemporary anti-authoritarian ideals in social work, dialogue-based interventions, such as motivational interviewing, have gained increasing popularity. However, social work is always oriented towards certain institutional goals, and dialogue-based interventions have been described as governmental technologies designed to transform and produce institutionally preferred subjects through self-formation. By analysing conversations at Swedish social service units, between clients who use illicit drugs and social workers, the chapter demonstrates how dialogue-based technologies subjectify both clients and social workers in certain ways, including participants’ resistance against specific kinds of subjectification. The chapter illustrates how social work dialogues include negotiating clients’ and professionals’ subjectivities respectively. A governmentality perspective on subjectivity in dialogue with an ethnomethodologically infused study of actual social work interaction is shown to deepen and nuance the analysis of attempts to transform subjectivities in advanced liberal societies. The chapter thus contributes theoretically to our understanding of subject formation in situ in institutional settings.
